Last Monday, my car’s (Subaru Impreza) low oil light came on while I was driving down the highway. I didn’t know what the light was and nothing sounded wrong so I kept driving. When I got to my parents’, I looked up the symbol and then learned it was probably not a good idea for me to have kept going. Luckily, no harm seems to have been done.
Continue reading post "Low oil"problem posts
In January, I made another of my cinnamon roll cheesecake’s. I was in a rush and did not let it set in the fridge at all. And it really came out as a gooey circle of glop. The center sunk in and it was hard to serve. Really wouldn’t have been presentable if it weren’t just to my close family. I’ve learned how important that setting is for cheesecake.
However, it was still quite tasty. It was huge for four people, but it did eventually get eaten over a week-long period.
This one had three changes from normal. One, I mixed in most of the cinnamon crumble to the main batter in the mixer. I think this just turned out better and I will probably do it again. Two, I used duck eggs instead of chicken eggs. That was all Whole Foods had in a six pack at the time. They were expensive too, more expensive than the dozen chicken eggs, but I didn’t want to waste any. Three, I didn’t put the frosting on top because I was in such a rush that I didn’t have time to make it.
Yesterday, a storm came through. Knocked some trees down and knocked out power at my parents’ house for 27 hours. Luckily they got a whole-house generator a couple years back, and it worked like a champ.
Continue reading post "#4418"Weird commute home tonight. Thunder, no: fireworks. Car flashing brights. Tree down across the road, had to clear a path. Skunk by the driveway.
Continue reading post "#4368"I haven’t been able to upgrade composer with homebrew to version 2.7.7 (on Intel Mac).
Continue reading post "#4355"xz backdoor
Reading this weekend about a backdoor introduced to the open source xz
project. It doesn’t appear to affect my Ubuntu servers, so I had assumed it wasn’t relevant to me. However, the homebrew version on my Mac was “vulnerable”. It sounds like the exploit would only work on some versions of Linux, but if it does work on Macs, that could be bad. I do a lot of stuff on this computer, including banking, email, coding, etc. They know about it backdooring ssh
, but if there’s something they don’t yet know about, it might be a problem.
I have a Fedora install as well. I haven’t checked it yet, but Fedora is usually on the bleeding edge, so if it’s on there, I’ll probably wipe and reinstall. I’ve been considering anyway. Luckily, I don’t do anything important on there.
Even if it didn’t actually do anything bad on the Mac, it may have done something. I had noticed some weeks or months ago (I can’t remember when) that running PHP on the command line was going slow. Running anything would take a minimum of about five seconds, including something simple like php -r 'echo "hello\n";'
. I know when I had been making scripts in the past they hadn’t been taking long at all. I did some searches on the web for anybody mentioning something like that and couldn’t find anything. So I kinda just figured maybe it had something to do with the new opcode / whatever cacheing newer versions do or something, like it takes some initial setup that the server can reuse but not the command line. I assumed I was stuck with it and even started moving some scripts to bash
partly because of it. When I downgraded xz
via homebrew though, I decided to test it. time
says the simple php -r
line took 0.092 seconds. Nice and snappy. So maybe xz
was doing some checks to see if the device was exploitable. It was in the dependency graph of PHP through curl
and gd
. Can’t say for sure that it just sped up though and if the xz
change was what caused it.
I’m glad my scripts finally run quickly again, but hope that nothing was exploited here. I’ll keep an eye on the web to see if anything comes up about Macs being exploitable, and if so I’ll probably reinstall the OS to be safe.
Note: If you have used homewbrew to install PHP, curl, or anything else that might depend on xz
, run brew update; brew upgrade
to be safe. The dangers of being on the bleeding edge I guess.
My Moto X phone, a stand-in for my non-functioning Pixel 3a, scared me by force shutting down and then getting stuck in a reboot loop for a bit. That’s too similar to the behavior of the Pixel. Luckily, plugging it into a different USB charger and giving it time, the problem resolved itself and it has been running fine for almost a full day. Hopefully, that keeps up, as I still haven’t gotten the Pixel going or figured out what I want for a new phone.
Pixel phone may be dead?
My “current” phone (4.5 year old Pixel 3a) may be dead. I now can’t get it past the login screen and have moved to my previous phone, my Moto X. That buys me some time until I can figure out what to do. It started late Friday night and has been my weekend project.
Continue reading post "Pixel phone may be dead?"I went to send a private message on Twitter for the first time in probably 6+ years, and was made to do some human verification thing through a third party service.
Continue reading post "#4268"Furnace went out again. Had to clean out the trap.
Continue reading post "#4251"